A matter of chance?

The man who wins the lottery once is envied; the one who wins it twice is investigated.
It is not every day that one's wife is murdered; it is more uncommon still that the murder occurs after the wife says she wants a divorce; and more unusual still that the jilted husband collects on a ...

Marilyn Kelly completely misses the point. Five fires of any kind in a dozen years is pretty extraordinary, and that is the whole utility of the doctrine of chances. It doesn’t have anything to do with improper character evidence; it merely said that defendant’s protestations that there was an innocent cause of this fire is objectively less probable.